Unveiling
AfghanistanThe Bush
Administration cares about women's rights (as long as there aren't any
pesky women around)By Sara
Pursley, Working
For Change, 14 December 2001

Remember that time our First
Lady became a revolutionary feminist, advocating armed struggle to end
"the oppression of women"? Wasn't that strange?Not strange enough, it seems. The
Bush Administration's recent bid to confuse liberals, with Laura Bush as
the good cop, has come off with hardly a hitch. Jane Smiley speaks for
many when, in a recent editorial in the New York Times, she expresses relief
at the prospect of liberating Afghan women: it's like a cure for helplessness.
Here's something we can all get behind; that ever-elusive unity may be
on the horizon at last (just as the Bushes hoped). Smiley writes that even
though she is "very ambivalent" about the bombing of Afghanistan, she believes
that "promoting the liberation of Afghan women is a political stance without
risk and without a downside."

Not so fast, Smiley. The risks to
women could be very real when a foreign power engages in simultaneous projects
of violence against a country's inhabitants and the "liberation" of its
women. And the Western obsession with unveiling Muslim women with one hand,
while dropping bombs with the other, has a particularly long and unfortunate
history.

Carla Freccero recently reminded
me what Algerian psychologist and liberation theorist Frantz Fanon wrote
more than forty years ago in his essay "Algeria Unveiled":

"The deliberately aggressive
intentions of the colonist with respect to the haïk [the Algerian
veil] gave a new life to this dead element of the Algerian cultural stock
... To the colonialist offensive against the veil, the colonized opposes
the cult of the veil ... [It] acquires a taboo character, and the attitude
of a given Algerian woman with respect to the veil will be constantly related
to her overall attitude with respect to the foreign occupation."

Smiley's no-risk analysis only works
if Afghan women exist outside of history. In reality, the few women who
have removed their burkas are brave not only because doing so could signify
resistance to their countrymen, but also because it could signify allegiance
to the foreign invaders who claim to be rescuing them -- at a cost that
is not only enormous, but also non-consensual and non-negotiable. The vast
majority of Afghan women have declined the invite.Fanon writes: "The dominant administration
solemnly undertook to defend this woman, pictured as sequestered, humiliated,
cloistered . . . transformed by the Algerian man into an inert, demonetized,
indeed dehumanized object." The fantasy that women are inert and passive
just because they're wearing a veil says a good deal more about Western
ideas of women than it does about anyone else's. It was precisely this
fantasy that, during the Algerian war for liberation, allowed Muslim women
to walk through French military checkpoints armed to the teeth with grenades
and other explosives. The New York Times recently informed us that "[s]hrouded
women move through the bazaars [of Kabul] like downtrodden ghosts." But
ghosts to whom?

If a woman disappears under the veil,
is hardly alive, then the so-called lifting of the veil is the equivalent
of being "born yesterday." And this is exactly how the Western media has
portrayed Afghan women. Reuters titled an article on an attempted November
20 women's march in Kabul, "Afghan Women Gather for Faltering First March,"
scarcely bothering to mention that it "faltered" because it was forcibly
disbanded by the Northern Alliance, not because its organizers were inexperienced.

Many of the organizers were, in fact,
seasoned activists with years of political experience under their belts.
There was Soraya Parlika, for example, who was imprisoned and tortured
for organizing women's demonstrations against President Hafizullah Amin
in 1979 and is currently chairwoman of the General Coalition of Women,
which has successfully operated underground since 1996. (Parlika also emphasized
to Time Magazine recently that "[t]he burka is not the main problem of
women" -- to little avail, since Time still couldn't resist calling its
cover story "Lifting the Veil.")

There was Najiluh, who taught secret
classes to women in her home throughout the Taliban rule. (Her students
carried their books to and from her house under their burkas.) And there
were young activists like 17-year old Nafeesa, who said, "[The Northern
Alliance] announced that women are free, but it is not freedom to throw
off our veils: that is not the liberty we want."

Bombing Afghanistan is not a sensible
way to express solidarity with its women, any more than it is a sensible
way to catch Osama bin Laden (who, for all we know, is strolling around
downtown Peshawar in a burka of his own). And it is not the veil itself,
but the Western idea of the veil, that allows us to see Afghan women as
having no voice, no agency, no history. This makes it easy to claim to
do anything on their behalf – like tear their country to shreds, for example.
There's nobody there to object, nobody we can see.

Of course, the Bush Administration
can quickly adopt a stance of cultural relativism when that suits its purposes
better than women's liberation does.

Ari Fleischer, when asked about the
Northern Alliance's forcible disbanding of a women's march in Kabul for
the second time in two weeks, said: "We're talking about different regions
of the world where people have their own cultures and histories." Never
mind that, this time, it was women from the very region, culture and history
in question who were fighting for their own liberation. Apparently, "we"
only like to fight for women's rights when the women aren't involved.